What is the practical influence of priority in a sitemap?

[flow_seo]

I have a directory site with 1000s of entries. Will there be benefit to be gained from playing with various entries priorities in the sitemap?  I was thinking I might give more priority to entries that have upgraded their directory entry.

Thanks.

[KeriMorgret]

JohnMu, a Google employee, answered this on the Google help forums last month.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=74fb248959989911&hl=en

I wouldn't worry too much about the "priority" values. If you're able to generate them based on useful information from your website, then it's a good idea to do that. If you can't automatically generate them and have too many pages to set the values manually, then it's fine to submit the Sitemap file without "priority" information. The "priority" value gives us a bit more information about your site, but changing values here generally won't lead to visible changes in crawling, indexing, or ranking overall.

[flow_seo]

Thanks Keri!